Optional Lithum ID Section

To the Center for the Core Curriculum,
In an email sent out shortly after the administering of the Literature Humanities final exam, course chair Gareth Williams notified students that Section A of the exam (the section that was compromised) would be the discounted entirely and not graded to ensure fairness. He wrote, “It is very unfortunate that the majority of you, who had no advance information or inclination to gain an unfair advantage, will be affected by this development; however, we have no other choice at this time but to take pragmatic measures to ensure the integrity of the grading.”

It is a good thing that the Center for the Core Curriculum has taken steps to ensure that some kind of fairness will be maintained in light of the leak of the IDs, but the Center is not following the precedent it set in 2007 when a similar incident transpired. In 2007, a former Literature Humanities instructor leaked similar notes giving certain students an unfair advantage. The faculty ad hoc committee in charge of resolving the matter in this case ultimately decided to offer students the choice of taking a second exam or having their grade on the previous final not count for their final semester grade.

In light of this precedent, a similar option of a retake should be given to students. To target the section that was compromised, we, the undersigned students, propose that all students who took the final be allowed the option to retake a newly drafted Section A (and have their exam graded with all three sections factored into the grade) or keep the grade calculated based on only sections B and C. Seeing as this section was the first in the exam and the section most students must study for, many students feel that they lost their strongest section as well as the section they spent most time on.

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